The Toymaker

by Liam Pieper

  ‘Open the chest cavity,’ he ordered. ‘Check the cardiac condition.’ The aids retrieved Arkady’s rag-doll body from the room and put him on an autopsy table. Strictly speaking, Dr Pfeiffer didn’t need to dissect Arkady – his team had already performed hundreds of live autopsies – but he wanted to make sure the man didn’t wake up, and, after seeing him survive the ice bath, he didn’t trust Arkady to die on his own.

  What were these Russians made of that they refused to die? They were savage, certainly, but they were also adamantine. He thought of the hopeless war being lost on the Eastern Front, and lamented that Hitler had lost the second he marched on Stalingrad. Once Dieter had examined an SS guard stationed at an Auschwitz satellite camp who had been wounded on the Eastern Front. As Dieter had checked on his slowly healing scars, the man had spoken about the horror of holding off a Russian advance, the hordes of soldiers who ran screaming across the battlefield, some without weapons, some without shoes, to overrun their position. He’d been the heavy-calibre machine-gunner on a panzer, and the Soviets just kept coming, no matter how many he gunned down, a sea swarming over the ice, until his machine-gun had overheated and warped. When the soldier finished his story, he paused for a second, and started it again. It was all he would ever talk about, the Russians who weren’t afraid to die, had less feeling than steel, who had crawled over his crippled tank like insects.

  This was an empire that had carved itself out of snow and sadness, a nation of people where each had been given both a life not worth living and an iron will to survive. There was no way that Germany could beat Russia, no possible scenario in which they came out on top. The Russians would still be there after the bombs stopped, after the thousand-year Reich was dust, after the Soviet Empire fell, when all else was rubble and snow. They would inherit the earth, the Russians, and the roaches.

  Dieter knew what he would find inside Arkady. The pericardium – the layer protecting the heart – would be filled with fluid that would squirt out when pierced and the membrane would deflate. Then a piercing in the left ventricle would empty the still-beating heart out over a period of fifteen minutes, as the muscle slowed and stopped.

  The assistant made the first incision, a quick deliberate scalpel swipe to open the epidermis, slicing Arkady open from the hollow of his neck to his navel. The blade returned to the initial incision point for the second cut, a deeper, firmer stroke through fat and muscles to get at the joins of the rib cage covering the heart.

  ‘Stop!’ Dieter said, startling the assistant, surprising himself. ‘Close him up. We don’t need this data, and I want to go home for the day. Close him up and take him to the convalescent wing. If he lives, put him back in the Sonderkommando.’ Dieter walked back to his quarters, still unsure why he’d given the order. Arkady would still die, just more slowly now, from his injuries. But there was something snagged in the back of Dieter’s mind, something about Arkady he could not quite let go of.

  A little under a week had passed since they’d performed the depressurisation experiment on Arkady, and Dr Pfeiffer was trying to put it all behind him. He’d ordered a search of Arkady’s barracks and when his missing surgical tools had failed to reappear, he had been annoyed but out of options. If he reported the theft it would only lead to bureaucratic snooping and awkward questions. Better to let them go, order replacements, move on.

  On a whim one evening he stopped at the building where they housed Mengele’s children and let himself in. He moved quietly, unlocking the door and swinging it open so as not to alarm the subjects. It was late and most of them were asleep, exhausted or drugged. Those who were conscious started in fear and pulled their legs up to their bodies, scuttling away from him to press their backs against the wall. One or two of them whimpered as he walked past their bunks. He didn’t blame them: nothing good ever came from men in lab coats. The fear it sparked made handling them difficult. More than the company, Dieter would miss Arkady’s way with the children. Even when things were really grim he was able to calm them down, relieve their suffering a little, make them pliable. Dieter’s research would be much harder to accomplish without Arkady’s help.

  He reached the end of the barracks, sighed, turned to walk back, when his eyes caught something amiss. A little girl, maybe eight or nine, he thought, although once a child got to a certain level of emaciation it got hard to tell, was hiding something behind her back.

  ‘Hello,’ he said, not unpleasantly, squatting down so he was at eye level with her. ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘Sarah.’

  ‘What have you got there?’

  The girl shook her head furiously. ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Nothing, hey? Isn’t that a coincidence!’ Dieter reached into his pocket and produced one of the bars of chocolate he and the other doctors carried to bribe reticent children. ‘I have a nothing too! Perhaps you could have a bite of my nothing if you show me yours.’

  The gears turned in Sarah’s head, she made a careful calculation, and relented, retrieved a doll from behind her back, handing it to Dieter and falling upon the chocolate, while all the other children watched in dismayed jealousy, eyes shining in the dark.

  Dieter turned the doll over in his hands. It was rough but serviceable, a little boy hacked from raw wood with a tiny sharp blade – scalpel strokes; just a plump wooden torso with a head and arms wobbling from it. It was dressed in crude white pyjamas, which, even in the dark of the barracks, he could identify by touch as medical gauze. The limbs and the head moved as he manipulated them, and looking closely he could see simple hinges made from refashioned surgical sutures.

  ‘Where did you get this?’

  ‘I can’t tell you. It’s a secret.’

  ‘Did the nice doctor give you this?’

  Sarah stared glumly at her feet. Dieter gave the doll back to her. ‘Does he have a name, your little friend?’

  ‘Michael.’

  ‘That’s a nice name,’ said Dieter. ‘Why did you call him that?’

  ‘I didn’t!’ protested Sarah. ‘The nice doctor gave him to me and said he could be my new Michael until real Michael came back. So I wouldn’t be lonely.’

  ‘I see . . . And where is real Michael?’

  ‘He went away with one of the other doctors.’ Sarah looked around, then whispered, ‘One of the mean ones. That was days ago.’

  Dieter nodded. ‘And Michael is your brother?

  She nodded.

  He studied the girl’s features, her hair, her eye colour, her cheekbones. They were familiar; she must have been the sister of a boy he’d finalised, just that morning.

  Well, that’s that, thought Dieter, but he said, ‘Then is there a little Sarah doll? For Michael to have when he comes back?’

  ‘Yes! But he isn’t finished yet,’ Sarah said, then bit her lip. ‘And I’m not allowed to show anyone.’

  ‘But you see, the nice doctor and me, we are friends. He sent me here to have a look at little Michael, and the Sarah doll, and to give you this!’ He produced another chocolate bar, and then Sarah was leading him by the hand, out of the barracks, into the snow, to a patch of dirt under an awning. Using her hands, she dug in the mud and retrieved a bundle of rags. They’d once been a prisoner’s uniform but mud had turned the stripes to a single grimy shade. Setting it down in the snow, he unwrapped it carefully and found a block of wood, half carved into a likeness of little Sarah. As he unwrapped the parcel, his missing scalpel fell out, along with a half-dozen surgical instruments, and odds and ends from the lab, now blunt and dull from woodcarving. Dieter picked them up and realised the mistake he’d made, the conclusion he’d jumped to.

  Arkady had been making toys. He had stolen blades not to slit Dieter’s throat but to cheer up Mengele’s children. Dieter had been, he realised now, too emotional in his reaction to the missing tools, a little hasty in ordering Arkady’s murder.

  Dieter found Arkady on the floor, unconscious, barely breathing, in the middle of the barracks, a couple of prisoners tugging at
his boots and so busy arguing over who would get to keep them they didn’t notice him come in. Without stopping to think, he drew his pistol and fired it, point-blank, into the back of one of their heads. In the silence that followed, Dieter heard himself sniff and, pulling himself back together, he aimed the pistol at the remaining assailant.

  ‘You, pick this man up and carry him to my offices. He needs medical attention, and he still has work to do.’

  FIVE

  Arkady hears boots thudding up the stairwell to the apartment and he smiles. Jan, fundamentally lethargic in his manners, work ethic and attitudes, is still prone to sudden bursts of energy in certain situations, like the childlike way he runs up every flight of stairs he encounters; no matter the time of day, his state of inebriation, the level of his fatigue, he will mount the first step like a toddler chasing a puppy.

  As the boots round the curve of the staircase and barrel up towards the top floor where their apartment rests, Arkady puts down his pencil but doesn’t turn around to face the door, pretends to be still absorbed by the anatomy book open on the desk. He is trying to set a good example for Jan, who, when the Nazi state annexed Prague and closed the universities, immediately quit his studies and went on vacation. Jan has little hope that the schools will open again. The distant castle Hradčany that looms over the town now flies swastikas and a black flag embossed with two runic Ss. Its walls bristle with artillery which is aimed not outwards to ward off liberating armies, but down towards the Old Town, ready to eliminate the civilian populace at a moment’s notice. It is, Jan argues, a poor sign for the resumption of intellectual life in Prague, and he won’t waste the time he has left on schoolbooks.

  Arkady, on the other hand, has kept going, as best he can. He is stubborn, and proud of how far he’s come in life through sheer will. His stubbornness keeps him at his books in preparation for the day Russian tanks will roll in, the schools will open again and he will be rewarded, with his medical degree as official validation of his pig-headed optimism.

  His friends, those of them left, make fun of him, but he has a sense of mission. The war will end, and when it does, the insanity that has submerged the world will recede, and it will need civilised men to help rebuild: architects, lawyers, doctors.

  Jan teases him mercilessly for his naivety and Arkady is defenceless against his mockery. He teases Arkady’s speech, his autodidact’s way of reaching for words he cannot quite master. Arkady’s German is a mongrel thing; a stubborn dog that will not heel. It was learned in the eye-widening, brain-searing tumult of experience his life has been since leaving Russia, and is tainted with stray bits of Czech, French, English and the ponderous Latin picked up from his textbooks. If he tries to speak German – something romantic, for example – no matter how carefully he constructs the sentence in his brain, it will invariably trip out mangled with some errant Latin conjugate that has forced its way in from his medical classes.

  Jan, who has grown up in Krakow sandwiched between the Weimar Republic and the Soviets, speaks Russian nearly as well as he does German, and in the time they have been living together, Jan has worked hard to improve Arkady’s language skills. It’s a thankless task, though, both figuratively and literally, and so most of the time they speak in the strange bastard tongue that they have built between them, out of scraps of Russian and Polish. A messy jerry-rigged Slavic that only they will ever understand; a language built for two. Over time, a word will shrink into slang, reduced to the bare essentials. ‘Spokojnie’ was something Jan said to Arkady every time he got excited, or angry, or scared, and over time it became ‘spokoja’, and finally just ‘spoko’.

  Spoko. Relax. Everything will be fine.

  Arkady thinks Jan is too relaxed. Most days, while Arkady busies himself with his textbooks, Jan will walk down the river­bank to Most Legií, where he will cross the bridge halfway to the island in the middle of the river, then clamber down to the sandy banks to watch the clouds and drink wine. No matter how dire things seem in Prague, no matter what shortage is gripping the city, Jan is always able to find wine, so by the time he comes home he will be half cut. In truth, and in secret, Arkady has started drinking earlier in the day too, staring up past his textbooks, out the window that overlooks the tranquil river and the medieval bridge and the wooded hills beyond it.

  Nearly every morning they float the idea of going walking through those hills, and it quickly becomes an argument. The year is growing late and the leaves are starting to turn and fall. Jan often indulges his native Silesian urge to hike up every pretty hill he sees and conquer it with a picnic blanket, but has never been able to persuade Arkady to join him. ‘We live in the most beautiful city in the world, and we would never know it. Let’s go walk up a mountain! Look back down at the town! Glory in the majesty of creation!’

  Arkady refuses, often because he knows refusing will start a fight, and he loves a fight; the fury, the tender resolution. They fight over the forest like they fight over everything, half seriously, for something to do, as a prelude. Jan likes the forest best in the autumn, as leaves fall soft and restive as you stroll. Arkady can stand the forest only in the summer, when the heat tears at his lungs as he huffs up a hill.

  For him, the woods in winter are a utilitarian thing at best, full of shadows and superstition and memories from a childhood spent gathering wood to stay warm. Even the smell of autumn in the woods reminds him of the grim soviet workshops he worked in with his toymaker father. His hands are adorned with scars from the tools of those workshops, and when he finds himself staring absent-mindedly out the window, he will run his fingertips over those phantom cuts to remind himself of his mission. He can be single-minded, but he cannot help that, and no, he will not go hiking with Jan when there is work to be done.

  He will, however, go to lunch. A man has to eat, and when Jan comes bumbling in, no doubt humming Beethoven’s 16th, just the allegro, just one bar of it again and again, it will drive Arkady to distraction and off to fetch his coat. Then they will hurry to make the daily special at the Café Louvre, just like yesterday where, between the entree and the main, slowly, deliberately, Jan took his napkin from his lap, folded it to place alongside his plate and, with the slightest smile to Arkady as he sat across the table, rose to visit the restroom. He left a cigarette burning in the ashtray. It was a signal: to the waiter that he would be back to finish his meal; to Arkady to follow and find him in the WC.

  Arkady waited as long as he could, the span of half the cigarette, before he slipped out of the booth and wove through the smoky bustle of waiters and into the cool silence of the toilet block. He found Jan at the basin washing his hands and stood next to him, glanced down. He towered over the smaller man. There was no one else in the room, but, just to be sure, Arkady threw a furtive glance over his shoulder before he reached across and ran a hand down Jan’s back to cup the muscled curve of his buttock.

  The men in the sharp, handsome uniforms who filled the dining hall would kill them if they saw what happened next. Arkady knew this, but only cerebrally, and clear thinking has nothing to do with the reality he shares with Jan.

  Jan turned and embraced Arkady, reached up for a kiss, which he cannot make, even standing on tiptoe, so planted his lips on the soft, bristled skin of his throat, sending a shock down the Russian’s skin and spine, which came to rest pleasantly in his belly. Arkady bent slightly, tilted his head to meet the smaller man’s mouth, lost himself there, found himself again a moment later pushed up against the marbled wall of the restroom, a pit stop on the way to the privacy of a cubicle, his breath frantic and his hands clumsy as they fumbled at buttons, belts, flies, and then, in another flash, they moved apart as the door swung open.

  An SS officer stood in the doorway. He was a baby, no more than twenty-three, his uniform crisp and black. ‘Excuse me,’ he said, after an uncertain moment.

  ‘Please,’ Jan replied without missing a beat, in his perfect German, ‘excuse us. My friend here never could handle his alcohol.’ He smiled h
is winning smile at the Nazi, who seemed unsure of what he had walked in on.

  Arkady, for his part, was terrified. Jan is Jewish, but lapsed in every way except for his swarthy Ashkenazi je ne sais quoi, with his tousled curls and jutting chin. He hadn’t so much renounced God as slipped out of His house and on to a life of science and reason and breathless teenaged bacchanal in Berlin with men who’d given up their own gods in the trenches of the Western Front. His German accent is Berliner, but with a dangerous Institut für Sexualwissenschaft lilt to it, and that could have caught the SS’s attention.

  Jan’s effeminate side is something he slips in and out of like an outfit, of which he has a closetful. He is a different man in the streets of Prague from the one he was around his large, wealthy family back in Poland, and another one altogether from the one who, in 1937, showed the newly emigrated Arkady around Krakow at the request of a professor who was hoping to entice him to enrol at the medical school there.

  At first he was dismayed at the chore, but as the day wore on, Jan decided he quite liked the Russian, gruff and laconic as he was. They started with a breakfast of dumplings and beer, and then showed him around the old town, the castle, the market square, the church tower where once a day a trumpeter sounded a warning call.

  ‘Why?’ Arkady demanded.

  ‘Well, the legend goes that in the thirteenth century an old watchman saw a Mongol horde advancing on the city, and blew his trumpet again and again and again until the city rallied and the archers repelled the Mongols, and Krakow was saved. But when they went up the tower to thank the watchman, they found him dead. Shot right here.’ He reached up and touched Arkady on the throat, where the thick carotid pulsed up to the brain. The Russian smiled. ‘Took a Tartar arrow to the neck and died still holding his bugle. So every day, to honour him, a trumpeter plays to remember the man who saved us from the Mongols.’